So the past few days has seen some rather BIG changes on the Dirty Boxers Site – some you can see, and some that you can’t… Well, at least, not yet. I thought it would be a good idea to explain about what I am planning for the whole site, and what the whole vision is. This is all listed in no particular order, and I hope it inspires the Family of DB to get involved with all these changes.

Let’s make the site work for us more
The biggest frustration for me, as one of the producers for the DB Family, is that the site has never really been able to do what I’ve always envisioned. What I realised recently is that the site has always ‘said’ things, but hasn’t really said things in a informative way. Over the winter of 2014/15, the main objective is to make the site work more for us than it does recently.

The first stage of this new transformation is to realise (and remember) that pixels are cheap, and are recycled. So we can use as many as it takes, instead of what we have been shamelessly doing, so eager to get the material out than worrying about the ‘quality’ being there.

Golden Rule: Content is Cheap – Material is quality.

Getting the Family of DB involved a lot moreI’ve never liked the whole concept of having a central “hub” and people / DB Family just being consumers. The show has never really been about me. It’s actually about the strong bonds and friendship we have within the DB Family, and how together we can create wicked things.

I’ve always wanted to try and encourage much more ownership over DB from the Family. This is mainly way I am so eager personally to try and bribe / beg Tory & Big Voice Jay to keep Dirty Boxers: Saturday going. Their “spin-off show” illustrates perfectly the kind of “universe” I’d like to push the community towards. Dirty Boxers isn’t a show – it is a movement. A mentality. A mutual respect for each other in a cold, crazy, mucked-up world.

Even though several key individuals have been willing to set forward and take over the reins in some very important areas – which is hugely gratifying and truly awesome – I’d like to try and build on this brilliant foundation a little more. I hope that with some more willing volunteers, it will mean the whole project will be a shining example of what new-media can be. Truly trendsetting stuff.

Sharing the load of technology across multiple “mini-sites”Prior to this first phase of changes I have made over the past week, there were over 1300 posts and 72 pages that made up the Dirty Boxers website. This was a hell of a lot of information and downloads for one site to manage – especially with the “let’s get it done” attitude.

There were some duplication in material in some way, which has been streamlined slightly. I’ve also started a long journey of “splitting” up the information in to key areas. The first experiment of this was actually creating this separate blog – ensuring the servers, domains [etc] could handle this weird collection of “mini-sites” focusing on specific key subjects.

Eventually, all these ‘separate’ sites will link together (like Lego) to run (hopefully) smoothly as one massive site. I’ve always found great inspiration from the BBC Website concerning how the overall Dirty Boxers Site would work – many highly focused sites – to help facilitate more community and discussion throughout.

Dirty Boxers & YouTubeAs a show, we have not focused on using the platform enough to promote ourselves. Over the next few months, this is a major priority for the Dirty Boxers Family – creating interesting and dynamic material that we can use as a way for new members to find us and join us.To be frank, I did not have the time to be able to create and maintain everything that was needed of me to keep everything going. I was naive to think at the beginning of 2014 that I would be able to turn around so much material in such relatively short periods. On show days, I wouldn’t be able to complete the whole to-do list and uploads until midnight – 2am most evenings.

The current plans are to bring back Dirty Boxers: Bitesize – as a vehicle to discuss all those great news stories that we didn’t get round to talk about on the main show. Also, I’ve been thinking for some time to create a newsletter / blog post / video show talking and showing things that might not necessarily on the horizon of most people – but will hopefully will be inspiring and enlightening.

Obviously, there is a bit of uncertainty to these ideas – with much work still to do for the Charity as well as I hope that I’d be able to travel about more in 2015. It isn’t going to be easy, but all the great stuff in life never is. I really hope that I can organise a way to ensure that all elements can be maintained while I travel around the UK – especially if keep to a Monday, Wednesday & Friday schedule.

But for now, nothing else can happen until these exciting but challenging changes are made to the whole site. It is almost likely that things will break, and cause issues. But I hope that if I try and keep as honest as I can about these changes, as they happen – I hope that things can run as smoothly as possible.

Please feel free to ask any questions below, and I’ll answer them as much as I can at the moment.